The big question is "what is Y in this case"?
(Source: I work at Google, yet still see life as often confusing and sometimes terrifying)
https://8thlight.com/blog/ryan-verner/2019/01/15/evolution-o...
But it is confusing are 8th Light acting as a source of training for other companies or just internal use.
How many years is it 4 / 5 what certification do you get at the end?
Why are you using "trade" terminology normally those doing "advanced apprenticeship" where associate professions and calling us "apprentices" would have got you a hard look.
when I did mine in the UK I was a Junior member of the IMECHE on the path way to full chartered (PE) membership
It does seem a bit light how long is the apprenticeship
If FANG companies where serious about training / diversity this is what they should be doing take bright high school kids at 18/19 and sign them up for a proper 4/5 year apprenticeship.
Also, it's weird that you call out guilds for being discriminatory but then give an example of discrimination in employment. We have fair employment laws to prevent this type of behavior and arguably could have "fair guild membership" laws if it became a problem.
It's fair to argue against guilds for driving up prices by limiting membership.
And employment discrimination laws won’t solve the problem because the discriminatory effect arises from the legal practice of protecting existing members at the expense of potential new entrants.
There was a very clear example of this recently in Chicago. Lori Lightfoot explained that she wouldn’t pursue police funding cuts because under the union contracts, cuts would have to be made from newer employees first. (Last in First out.) That would mean that 2/3 of the cuts would be Black and Hispanic officers, even though less than half of the overall force is Black and Hispanic.
Perhaps that is by design - companies are wary of investing time and money training junior employees because they can just leave before the investment pays for itself?
Not sure what the answer is here; just playing devil’s advocate.
When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they systematically excluded Black people, for example.
Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous generations). Travel the world and you'll see that (perhaps outside some European countries) the US of today is just about the least racist country in existence.
Guilds/Unions formed today won't have the same issues as ones from 50-60 years ago because the general view of people today isn't what it was back then.
No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.
But in an industrial union, as an example get hired by an automaker with a UAW contract (and not in a so called right to work state), you are a UAW member.
Personally, when I look for a job, I'm not willing to commit to 30-40 years. I think that part would have to change as well.
Apprenticeships for things like plumbers and electricians pay a decent wage interspersed with education.
On the long term a Ph.D may do better than a Master Electrician, but in the short term it's a way better deal. My friend out of HS who started working for Nissan and then Infinity was making 60k+ before he was 21. He's capped at around that much -- like 60-70k -- but most of our high-school friend circle wasn't making that kind of money until our late 20s (and at least one became a teacher, and still doesn't get that much in terms of pure cash comp).
More discussion on "the root of this" might lead to the above changing.
If you don't have that foot in the door you are usually spending a few years working for "Exposure" or "Networking opportunities." Sometimes for minimum wage or less. Unless the job is so hard that it's constantly churning workers. I'm sure a lot of jobs will take you off the street with no experience, but they will be dangerous and/or unpleasant.
Naturally when generalizing there will be exceptions. But that was essentially the rule when I got out of college. 2+ years experience prerequisite for most "Entry-Level" positions.
Luckily, I knew this when I started my PhD program, because of an oversupply of mentors and role models within my own family. Also, I was planning on carving out my own niche anyway because I'm a punk. But it's not for the faint of heart.
Still, I'm skeptical about modifying PhD education to turn it into a "credential" that comes with an employment guarantee. Part of academic freedom is the freedom to study something that nobody cares squat about. Also, many of the people who are attracted to doing that, are unlikely to prosper in a mainstream career anyway.
For myself, I realize that becoming a programmer after high school might actually have been better from a lifetime earnings standpoint, but it assumes that I would actually have survived an entry level job in a code factory or IT department.
I've interviewed and worked with so many PhD from top tier schools and it's astounding to me that someone can spend 6+ years studying a quantitative science, at a school like MIT or Harvard and still not have a basic understanding of statistics, and worse be incapable of genuinely understanding any of the quantitative tools they used for years.
The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research, they simply know how to mechanically replicate the processes you need to survive in academia today.
I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development program where really the only way to fail out was through attitude issues. One of the people who oversaw the program mentioned that she's only ever seen people with PhDs and higher fail out over this issue.
I also think it's unrealistic to expect PhDs to have a "basic understanding of statistics" unless they specifically studied it. I would be shocked and dismayed to see a PhD statistician misunderstand basic statistics; I wouldn't blink if a PhD mathematician or physicist made basic statistical errors. It's hard enough to achieve research-level mastery of one domain in five years, and many mathematicians and physicists (most?) do not need stats.
If you're talking about fields like psychology or sociology, I personally disagree with the expectations they're held to. I believe we would have less of a reproducibility crisis if research projects had statistician coauthors and peer reviewers, rather than just PhDs for whom statistics is not a core competency. That would be fairer and more realistic.
Finally, to be blunt it's hard for me to take this comment seriously when you say something like this:
> The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research
I'd say a Master's is the new BA/BS. With everyone getting an undergrad degree via online schools, or via 6+ years of undergrad college, it's ability to filter is weak. A brick-and-mortar Master's serves as a way to differentiate from that pack; I'm not sure what an online Master's equates to.
Georgia Techs OMSA, OMSCS, UT Austin Masters in DS, CS online.
Heh.
A PhD degree does generally prove expertise in whatever the subject of your dissertation was and provides access to a couple of networks. Not always guaranteed, but if someone has a PhD I generally expect that they are at least competent at whatever their dissertation was about. And I've only been burned once.
The value of the expertise & set of networks, though, can range from "extraordinarily valuable" to "worse than useless".
In STEM fields the expertise & network is usually at least good enough to keep you busy with decent-paying work for a career or so.
In CS it's usually good enough to get you either a 100K job with lots of freedom or a regular old 300K job at a big tech. So, not really worth doing if your goal is just maxing out lifetime earnings, but certainly there are worse outcomes. From there you're on your own, though.
In many of the humanities... not so much.
(Although, here in the UK at least, the quality of degrees genuinely does vary by university in a way that roughly corresponds to their rankings. I know that's an unfashionable observable but I have seen enough degree programs at different universities to know it's likely true unless I happen to have seen an atonishingly unrepresentative sample. Partly this is self fulfilling because lower ranked universities are forced to take less good students and the level of the programme has to be adjusted accordingly, but part of it really is to do with quality of teaching.)
On our team we had a guy from ENA and he was the son of a French diplomat and a British mother - we quickly learnt he did not need any hand holding.